Many cable television headends receive program content from satellite streams. The cable headend may choose programs from several satellite sources. The sum of the bit rates of the selected programs may exceed the cable headend available output bandwidth. In this case, the headend must either transcode or decode & re-encode the video streams. This requires a cascaded decoder and second encoder at the cable headend. The first encoder may originate from two sources; one is located at the programmer uplink, the other may be the encoder used to compress data for a video server. The second encoder is also referred to as the re-encoder.
Multiple encoding processes, however, can result in inefficient allocation of encoding resources in the second encoder.
The present invention is therefore directed to the problem of developing a method and apparatus for processing video frames that ensures that encoding resources are efficiently applied against incoming video data during multiple encoding processes.